Fusion Best 100: Return to Forever & David Sanborn
Chick Corea goes electronic and a saxophonist stands at the crossroads of fusion and smooth jazz.
I spent last weekend in New York with my wife and son, which is why this issue is hitting your inbox a little later than usual. I didn’t make it to any record shops or see any shows while I was in the city, but I took my kid on his first subway ride (he loved it), saw friends and family, and ate a couple of bagels. Plus, I got to hum my favorite fusion tribute to NYC for a couple of days.
This issue of Attenuator is part of my year-long project devoted to listening to and writing about every record featured on the Fusion Best 100 list — a ranking of the 100 best Western jazz fusion albums released between 1969 and 1989, as chosen by the writers of Japanese magazine Record Collector.
I’m not sure why a newsletter focused on a list of jazz fusion records compiled by a Japanese magazine is resonating with the Substack algorithm, but thanks to the folks who have come on board over the past week or two — and to the longtime subscribers who are following along. We’re only six records into the list (which means that I’m already falling behind schedule), so there’s still plenty of fusion to come.
96. Return to Forever featuring Chick Corea - Where Have I Known You Before (1974)
Chick Corea passed away on my birthday in 2021, which was the same day I learned that Corea was a devout Scientologist1 who recorded two albums inspired by L. Ron Hubbard novels.2 Corea founded Return to Forever shortly after converting to Scientology in 1972, inspired by advice he received from Hubbard urging him to make music that would “communicate” to a larger audience. While Corea gained notoriety for his contributions to Mile Davis’ late-‘60s fusion records In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, he felt that Davis’ avant-garde approach to the genre simply wasn’t accessible enough (though the first two flute-forward Return to Forever LPs feel akin to Davis’ spacious, meandering approach to fusion).
After entering the group’s rock- and funk-informed era in 1973 with Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (a record that’s not present on the Fusion Best 100… but really should be), Where Have I Known You Before doubles down on propulsive arrangements and extended solos, splitting the difference between Herbie Hancock and prog rock. The album also solidifies Return to Forever’s longest-running lineup (lasting three years and as many albums), replacing former guitarist Bill Connors3 with 19-year-old fretboard wunderkind Al Di Meola, while retaining bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White.
Where Have I Known You Before is probably most well-known for being the first record showcasing Corea’s embrace of the Minimoog and ARP Odyssey synthesizers, but the contributions of Corea’s supporting players often outshine his initial foray into dialing in electronic tones. Opening track “Vulcan Worlds” is a breakneck Clarke composition (repurposed on a subsequent solo album) that features inhumanly fast bass lines, while White’s contribution (“The Shadow of Lo”) is a prog-rock-style exercise in shifting tempos and motifs, anchored by White’s poised fills and backbeats. Di Meola gets stuck with a lot of rhythm guitar parts (his best Return to Forever tracks are yet to come), occasionally getting a sizable solo.
For the most part, I think that Corea’s performances on the electric piano, clav, and organ are more impressive than his synth noodling — it’s clear that he’s experimenting with tones throughout this record, and not all of them have aged gracefully. The 14-minute closing track “Song to the Pharaoh Kings” contains the LP’s best synth parts, notably a layered three-minute intro leading into a winding minor-scale jam that caps off the record with great solos from Clarke and Di Meola.
There’s a lot that I enjoy about Where Have I Known You Before, but I wouldn’t count it among my favorite Return to Forever or Corea records. That’s an opinion that doesn’t seem to be shared by folks purchasing physical media in Japan, where this particular record has been reissued on CD (the discerning fusion listener’s format of choice, apparently) five times over the past two decades. That enthusiasm for Corea’s music (Return to Forever, in particular) extends to the Fusion Best 100 list, which features no less than six of his albums — the highest number of entries from any individual artist or group.
95. David Sanborn - Hideaway (1980)
You can understand why David Sanborn chafed at his music being described as “smooth jazz,” actively avoiding the label throughout much of his career. The “easy listening” genre (which gained its name via a focus group) exploded commercially in the ‘80s, became an unobtrusive radio format notoriously played in office settings, eventually served as the de facto soundtrack of the Weather Channel, and was simultaneously a shorthand for boring, uninspired, background music and a style that yielded millions of record sales. The duality of smooth jazz wasn’t lost on Sanborn, who explained to the Smooth Views blog in a 2005 interview, “Some people use it as a compliment. Some people use it as an epitaph. So I get it from both sides, but I'm used to it.”
Inspired to take up the alto sax after hearing Ray Charles and his backing band perform, Sanborn worked up enough chops as a teenager to sit in with musicians at blues clubs in his native St. Louis. A journey to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love” in 1967 lead to Sanborn joining the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and performing with the group at Woodstock. From there, he quickly became an in-demand session musician, contributing memorable sax solos to tracks like David Bowie’s “Young Americans” and James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” while playing on records by fusion acts like the Brecker Brothers, George Benson, Bob James, and Tony Williams. By the late ‘70s, he became something of a fixture on David Letterman’s show and performed in the Saturday Night Live band, taking on the lead part in the show’s indelible theme.
Sanborn recorded four solo albums in the latter half of the ‘70s that melded his buttery alto melodies with the fusion sound of the era, but Hideaway marks a perceptible stylistic shift. There’s a polished, pristine sheen to the production of this collection of tunes; subdued drums, subtle string arrangements, and a tinge of reverb on every sax lick. Two songs on the LP penned by Sanborn (“Carly’s Song” and “Lisa”) approach the sterile, stereotypical smooth jazz sound, but the rest of Hideaway offers some variety. There are a couple of tunes co-written by Michael McDonald (“Anything You Want” and “Again an Again”) that are Steely Dan coded (Sanborn contributed a sax part to “Time Out of Mind” on Gaucho) and a cover of “The Seduction” from Giorgio Moroder’s American Gigolo soundtrack that might as well play over the SNL credits.
Hideaway was the first in a string of hit records for Sanborn that stretched through the mid-’80s, each a bit more reliant on synths and programmed drums than the last. The more I listen to it, the more this early foray into a smoother sound feels like a jazz and R&B fusion album that’s caught up in the evolving production style of the early ‘80s, when emerging techonology offered new ways to sculpt a recording in the studio — and who could blame Sanborn for sticking with a style that sold records?
The (roughly translated) write-up for Hideaway on the Fusion Best 100 list labels it as an “example of yuppie culture” while noting that Sanborn’s performances possess an "exquisite earthiness that flickers between the cracks of his stylish sound.” Just as smooth jazz was beginning to break away from its fusion origins, this record finds Sanborn embracing the gloss while preserving a bit of the grit.
One More Thing…
WBEZ contributor Mark Guarino got on the horn with Pitchfork Festival co-founder Mike Reed and dug into exactly why the Chicago edition of the fest got the kibosh just ahead of what would have been the event’s 20th anniversary. As I opined in my P4K post-mortem, one of the major factors behind the cancellation was the rapidly rising costs of booking talent. And it wasn’t a surprise that Pitchfork owners Conde Nast butted heads with Reed’s production team, but requests to book acts like Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato only demonstrate how little the publishing execs understood the event they inherited. What’s really wild is that the 2025 edition of the fest was moving forward… until Conde told Reed they were pulling the plug, 90 minutes before a public announcement in November.
I hope you’re not tired of Chick Corea, because he’s back again next week (with his Elektric Band) and I think most of his Scientology-related tangents are out of my system (or will simply be relegated to even more footnotes). Plus, a very interesting record from a Miles Davis collaborator and fusion innovator who sat down with some synths and developed his own language.
Corea’s religion was not something that he was particularly quiet about — it showed up in one of the obits I read and is deeply (if not explicitly) intertwined with a lot of the music he created — but I somehow avoided finding out about it until his death. I think it takes a certain level of notoriety and espousing of your beliefs for your name to become linked to a religion. There’s a reason that Tom Cruise and John Travolta are prominently associated with Scientology, while it’s still possible for the average person not to know that Elizabeth Moss and Giovanni Ribisi are also Scientologists.
Corea reformed the Chick Corea Elektric Band to record To the Stars (2004) and followed it up with The Ultimate Adventure (2006), released under his own name. Both records are bloated, 70-minute-plus “soundtracks” riddled with multi-part tracks that cover a lot of stylistic ground. Thankfully, they’re not all that different from any other late-career Corea album, and aside from their titles, there’s really no indication that they’re inspired by tales of time dilation and interdimensional travel. Corea also performed a few tracks on Hubbard’s 1982 Battleship Earth album (a.k.a. Space Jazz) — it’s so bad that using it as the soundtrack to the notoriously awful 2000 film adaptation probably wouldn’t have made that movie any worse.
Connors decided to leave the band just before Where Have I Known You Before was recorded, blaming Corea’s controlling, Scientology-inspired leadership style for his departure. In an interview with Guitar Player magazine, Connors explained, “[Corea] got more demanding, and I wasn't allowed to control my own solos. I had no power in the music at all. Then, we'd receive written forms about what clothes we could wear, and graphic charts where we had to rate ourselves every night – not by our standards, but his. Finally, we had to connect dots on a chart every night.”